Bringing together Irish emigrants and descendants during the Great Famine of Ireland

The Great Famine Voices Roadshow will be launched in New York on 9th April at the American Irish Historical Society. The Great Famine Voices Roadshow is a series of open house events in the United States and Canada that bring together Irish emigrants, their descendants, and members of their communities to share family memories and stories of coming from Ireland to North America, especially during the period of the Great Hunger and afterwards.

“We are excited about meeting people during the Great Famine Voices Roadshow and hearing their family stories about how their ancestors came from Ireland to start new lives in the United States,” declared Christine Kinealy, Director of Ireland’s Great Hunger Institute at Quinnipiac University, Connecticut. “We hope that people of Irish heritage in Canada will come to the Roadshow to share their family memories,” added Professor Mark McGowan from the University of Toronto.

“This Roadshow will provide a unique opportunity for Irish-Americans and Irish-Canadians to share their stories, strengthen their sense of ancestry, and historical and current Irish connections. All are welcome to these events”, said Caroilin Callery, a Director of the National Famine Museum in Strokestown Park, Ireland. “Over the past few years, we have been in search of stories from ‘the next Parish’ in North America, where so many of those who survived the Great Hunger – the biggest catastrophe of 19th century Europe – made new lives. We need to hear these stories,” she continued.

A selection of these family memories and stories will be made freely available on the Great Famine Voices online archive. www.greatfaminevoices.ie

The Great Famine Voices Roadshow in the USA and Canada will be hosted by the National Famine Museum at Strokestown Park, Ireland, and the Irish Heritage Trust, an independent charity. The Roadshow will be held in partnership with Ireland’s Great Hunger Institute at Quinnipiac University, the American Irish Historical Society, and the University of Toronto. It is funded by the Government of Ireland Emigrant Support Programme.

DETAILS OF ROADSHOW VENUES – All Welcome to these Free Open House Events.

April 9th: American Irish Historical Society, 991 Fifth Avenue, New York (launch)

Saving the Famine Irish: The Grey Nuns and the Great Hunger
Exhibition at the Russell Library

An exhibition exploring the little known story of the Grey Nuns and other religious orders in Montreal, who provided care and shelter to Irish immigrants in Canada during the Great Hunger, will launch in the Russell Library on Wednesday, 8 November at 16.00. Saving the Famine Irish: The Grey Nuns and the Great Hunger was curated by Professor Christine Kinealy, Director of Ireland’s Great Hunger Institute at Quinnipiac University, and Dr. Jason King.

One of the first priests to enter the fever sheds with the Grey Nuns was Father Patrick Morgan, who was ordained at Maynooth College in May 1842. Morgan was also one of the first clergy to perish from the typhus epidemic, dying on the 8 July, 1847.

Saving the Famine Irish: The Grey Nuns and the Great Hunger exhibition features original material from the historical collections of Maynooth University and St. Patrick’s College, Maynooth including the matriculation entry for Father Patrick Morgan and a letter of introduction for Montreal’s Bishop, Ignace Bourget (1799-1885), who visited Maynooth in 1847 to recruit Irish missionary priests.

Beyond Black Rock: Plans for a memorial park to honour as many as 6,000 typhus victims from the Summer of Sorrow appear to be in jeopardy.

What if some of the city’s best doctors, nurses, members of the clergy and the mayor were caring for the sick newcomers at the risk of their own lives?

What if the dead were being buried in hastily dug trenches next to the makeshift hospital, piled three coffins deep?

What if the death toll rose to the equivalent of 12 per cent of the city’s population?

You’d think a city couldn’t forget a thing like that.

The events of Black 47 are very real to Montreal-born, Dublin-based historian Jason King. On visits to his hometown, King, academic coordinator for the Irish Heritage Trust, which operates the Irish National Famine Museum, always makes a point of visiting the site in Pointe-St-Charles where as many as 6,000 people died of typhus in 1847.

Historian Jason King stands under Le Typhus by Theophile Hamel on the ceiling of Notre-Dame-de-Bon-Secours Chapel in Old Montreal. The painting depicts the typhus epidemic of 1847 in which Montreal nuns cared for the sick in fever sheds in Pointe-St-Charles. Credit: Peter McCabe / Montreal Gazette

You pass under a railway bridge, past a Costco store, derelict warehouses and empty parking lots bordered by concrete blocks. It’s easy to miss the monument to the typhus victims — a rough boulder in the median between traffic lanes on Bridge St., near the Victoria Bridge. On it are inscribed the words:

“To Preserve from Desecration the Remains of 6000 Immigrants Who died of Ship Fever A.D. 1847-48

This Stone is erected by the Workmen of Messrs. Peto, Brassey and Betts Employed in the Construction of the Victoria Bridge A.D. 1859.”

King contemplates the stone in silence, broken only by passing vehicles, the sighing wind and screeching of seagulls.

“You do feel a real sense of connectedness when you come to the actual place,” he says.

“Usually, when I come I’m by myself. There’s really nobody here. There’s passing traffic, but that kind of becomes white noise after a minute or two. The rock and the strange, empty parking lot. It’s a very moving site, a very strange site,” King says.

Dozens of cities, including Toronto, New York, Boston and Philadelphia, have sites commemorating the one million Irish who fled their homeland during the Great Famine of 1846-51 — of whom an estimated one in five died en route of disease and starvation.

Each year, some 20,000 tourists journey to Grosse-Île, the former quarantine station near Quebec City where more than 5,000 famine migrants died in 1847.

But Montreal, whose Black Rock is the world’s oldest famine memorial, has no appropriate place of remembrance — just this dangerous spot in the middle of a busy commuter route.

Google Earth image shows location of the Black Rock. The proposed memorial park would be built on land now occupied by the parking lot above it, and cement site to the left.

Yet it was in Montreal that the tragedy struck hardest, and that the community most heroically rose to the challenge of helping the sick and dying, King says.

“Montreal was in a sense the epicentre of the 1847 famine migration,” he says.

“It was the largest city in British North America. It was the only major city to have famine refugees in massive numbers come into the city itself.”

For the past five years, members of the local Irish community have been working to create a memorial park honouring those who fled the famine, only to die on Montreal’s waterfront.

Their plan calls for moving the Black Rock to the future park on the east side of Bridge St. at rue des Irlandais, an area now occupied by a parking lot and Lafarge cement site.

But in May, organizers of the Montreal Irish Monument Park Foundation learned the land earmarked for the park had been sold to Hydro-Québec, to build an electrical substation to supply the future Réseau électrique métropolitain (REM) train. Mayor Denis Coderre, who had initially pledged support for the park, now insists the substation must go ahead but has promised to find a compromise.

Coderre and other city officials refused to be interviewed for this article.

The Black Rock memorial marking the graves of typhus victims is lowered into place in 1859. Credit: William Notman / McCord Museum

The city is also keeping mum on its plans for the rest of the area between Bridge St., the Bonaventure Expressway and Mill St. — formerly the working-class neighbourhood of Goose Village, which the city demolished in 1964. The Coderre administration is reportedly eyeing the site for a future baseball stadium, to bring back Major League Baseball to Montreal.

“The Goose Village sector is targeted in the Stratégie Centre-Ville (a downtown development plan) which will be unveiled in the near future,” is all city spokesperson Jules Chamberland would say in an email exchange.

The REM project calls for a light-rail station underneath the Lachine Canal’s Peel Basin, with a north entrance in Griffintown and a south entrance about a 10-minute walk from the Goose Village site.

But to King, any project that brushes aside the site’s tragic history would be a violation of the last resting place of the thousands who died.

“You can’t imagine this happening anywhere else, that you’d have a mass grave in complete abandonment,” he says.

Sylvain Gaudet, a researcher with the Société d’histoire de Pointe-Saint-Charles, has pored over newspapers, maps and property records to document the burial grounds where the typhus victims were laid to rest. Initially, the sick were housed in sheds near the Peel Basin; later, sheds were built for them on the Goose Village site. Archaeological research is needed to determine what traces remain of the thousands buried at the two sites, Gaudet said.

Historian Jason King at the Irish Commemorative Stone, the Black Rock, situated in the median between traffic lanes on Bridge St. Proponents want a memorial park to be built on an adjacent site, and the rock moved there. Credit: Peter McCabe / Montreal Gazette

Anne-Marie Balac, an archaeologist who worked for Quebec’s Ministry of Culture for 27 years and is now a consultant, said “it’s unthinkable” to allow any project to be built without a thorough investigation of what lies under the ground.

“We know it has a very high archaeological potential because it’s a cemetery,” she said.

Several bodies have been unearthed over the years, including during roadwork and building of the Costco, leaving no doubt that the site is a former cemetery, Balac said.

In 1942, excavations near the entrance to the Victoria Bridge turned up the coffins of 12 typhus victims in a trench-like grave. They were reinterred near the Black Rock.

“It’s urgent to act before going too far,” Balac said.

* * *

In the spring of 1847, Montrealers braced for an influx from famine-stricken Ireland, where the potato crop had failed in both of the previous two years.

“We learn from British papers and private letters published in those of the United States, that the preparations for emigration from Britain, and especially from Ireland, are unprecedentedly great,” the Montreal Witness newspaper reported on March 8.

Fever sheds along the near shore, to the right, are seen from Mount Royal in 1852 in this lithograph by Endicott & Co. Credit: McGill University Rare Books and Special Collections

Fearing a deluge of undesirables, the United States tightened regulations for passenger ships, pushing up travel costs.

This meant the poorest immigrants would be forced to travel via Quebec City and Montreal, the Witness correctly predicted.

Soon “our shores are likely to be thronged with emigrants, chiefly of a class who will have little or nothing left when they arrive,” the paper warned, urging that “no time ought to be lost” in making preparations.

But nothing could have prepared Montrealers for what they saw when sick and starving immigrants began stepping off steamboats from Quebec City.

“Good God! What a spectacle. Hundreds of people, most of them lying naked on planks haphazardly, men, women and children, sick, moribund and cadavers; all of this confusion hit the eyes at once,” the Annals of the Sisters of Charity (Grey Nuns) reported on June 7.

The overcrowded “coffin ships” that brought the migrants to the New World — often Canadian timber vessels making the return trip with a human cargo — were the perfect breeding ground for typhus, spread by body lice infected with the Rickettsia prowazekii bacterium. (The cause would not be discovered until 1916.)

Theophile Hamel’s painting, Le Typhus, on the ceiling inside the entrance to Notre-Dame-de-Bon-Secours Chapel in Old Montreal. Nuns, priests, Protestant clergy and others disregarded their own safety to care for the newcomers. Credit: Peter McCabe

“Hundreds of poor people, men, women, and children of all ages, from the drivelling idiot of ninety to the babe just born, huddled together without light, without air, wallowing in filth, and breathing a fetid atmosphere…” Irish landowner and social reformer StephenDe Verewrote of a crossing to Quebec in 1847.

A foul odour wafted from the immigrant ships, like the stink of a dunghill on a foggy day, observed Grosse-Île’s medical superintendent, Dr. George Douglas.

“I never saw people so indifferent to life – they would continue in the same berth with a dead person until the seamen or captain dragged out the corpse with boat hooks,” Douglas wrote in a letter to the chief immigration agent in Quebec City.

Of the 100,000 who sailed for British North America in 1847, an estimated 70,000 arrived in Montreal, then a town of 50,000.

At first, the sick were housed in existing sheds on the south bank of the Peel Basin of the Lachine Canal. As the epidemic spread, prominent citizens demanded that a quarantine station be set up on the Boucherville Islands. But authorities rejected that idea as impractical and decided to build new sheds on the shore of the St. Lawrence, approximately where the Black Rock stands today. At the time, the site was on the waterfront but today the river is farther away because landfill has altered the shoreline.

By Aug. 1, patients were being cared for in 21 new, well-ventilated sheds, with a total capacity of 1,800. (Good ventilation was considered essential for healing because people then believed disease was spread by miasmas, or bad air.)

Those who died were buried next to the sheds, in long trenches where the coffins were piled three deep.

“The sheds were more or less here, on the waterfront,” King says.

“On the one hand, it’s a scene of utter desolation and desperation, with hundreds of people dying in abject misery, but also there’s a lot of compassion and there’s a lot of caring towards them,” he says.

While the tragedy was the city’s darkest moment, it was also in some ways its finest hour, he says.

“For all of the deaths, all of the anxiety and the fear, it’s in many ways a positive story. It’s a story of self-sacrifice, a story of people rising to the occasion,” he adds.

Nuns, priests, Protestant clergy and others disregarded their own safety to care for the newcomers. The Mohawks of Kahnawake brought food for the starving strangers.

“These are much, much bigger challenges than we can possibly imagine. When there were real risks, we accepted them all, with a generosity of spirit I think we rarely see today anywhere,” King says.

Wood engraving by John Henry Walker, between 1859 and 1885, shows the Black Rock on the waterfront. Today, landfill has greatly altered the shoreline. Credit: McCord Museum

Estimates of the death toll in Montreal in 1847 vary from 3,579 by Nov. 1 — the number reported by Canada’s chief immigration agent in Quebec City — to the 6,000 recorded on the Black Rock, which includes deaths in 1848. In its report for 1847, the city’s emigration committee stated 3,862 died of typhus in Montreal that year.

Quebec families adopted hundreds of Irish orphans at the urging of Catholic bishop Ignace Bourget. Their descendants are among the 40 per cent of Quebecers who claim some Irish ancestry.

“When the Irish settled in urban areas, they became English. When they settled in rural areas, they became French-Canadian, retaining their Irish surnames but otherwise indistinguishable from everyone else,” King notes.

Today, as Haitian asylum-seekers are sheltered in the Olympic Stadium and Syrian refugees adjust to life in Canada, the city’s response to the famine migrants of 1847 sends a powerful message, King says.

“After that initial moment of panic, it’s a story of people becoming accepted into their new communities, people becoming new French-Canadians or Irish-Canadians,” King says.

“In a nutshell, it’s a story of integration.”

* * *

Lithograph shows, in the background, fever sheds for the typhus victims of 1847 during the 1850s, when they were used to house the workers who built the Victoria Bridge from 1854-1859. Credit: McCord Museum

Voices from Montreal’s Summer of Sorrow

Numerous sources, including records kept by religious communities and newspaper reports, paint a vivid account of the famine migration to Montreal.

Bitterness and hope as Montreal Irish commemorate 1847 famine

Editorial: Forget granite stumps. What about the Black Rock?

Opinion: Montreal Mayor John Easton Mills helped the desperate

“One of the most remarkable things is that the Annals of the Grey Nuns are one of the most detailed records of any famine site anywhere in the world,” historian Jason King says.

“There are very absorbing descriptions of people arriving in unprecedented numbers,” he says.

“We’re very lucky to have those records.”

Local newspapers recounted the evolving crisis and vigorously debated on how it should be dealt with.

The following extracts provide a glimpse of how Montreal’s Summer of Sorrow unfolded:

June 7: When sick and starving Irish immigrants begin arriving in Montreal, the Grey Nuns step forward to nurse them.

Our Mother Superior heard that there were a great number of sick people lying outdoors along the docks and that they found themselves in the saddest of shape.

Immigrants who arrived in the city were required to report to the immigration office, which looked like this one from Illustrated London News in 1850. Credit: McCord Museum

After going out to investigate, she returned to the Mother House to describe the horrific condition of the immigrants and ask for volunteers.

She did not need to do so more than once, since our dear Sisters came in large numbers.

(Annals of the Grey Nuns)

June 13: As thousands pour into the city, the typhus sheds near the Lachine Canal are quickly overwhelmed. Patients are crowded three to a bed, with corpses lying alongside the living. Bodies pile up outside, awaiting burial.

The Grey Nuns record heartrending scenes, like a man who arrives from Grosse-Île searching for his wife, who had been sent on to Montreal before him. He finally spots her corpse on a pile of bodies and takes it in his arms, calling her name and kissing her, unable to believe that she is really dead.

Once he is convinced that she no longer exists, he abandons himself to his pain; the air is filled with his cries and sobs. … Scenes of this nature occur several times a day.

(Annals of the Grey Nuns)

A works map for the Victoria Bridge shows, along the shore, rows of workmen’s houses that formerly served as fever sheds for typhus sufferers. Credit: McCord Museum

June 21:With deaths from typhus averaging 20 per day, newspapers praise the tireless devotion of the nuns, priests and doctors caring for the patients around the clock. Most heartbreaking is the plight of the orphaned babies.

The most piteous sight of all, perhaps, is a separate shed, appropriated to the orphans, and in which sixty or eighty poor little creatures, some of them not many weeks old, are lying four and six in a berth, many of them wailing in every variety of tone. The priests, nuns, and others, are very attentive to these forlorn babes; but there appear to be no wet nurses yet, and it is almost impossible that many of them can survive.

(Montreal Witness)

June 24: Bishop Ignace Bourget calls on Quebecers to adopt the orphaned children.

Today, they are speaking through our voice to reach your hearts: “Do for us poor little orphans what you would want others to do for your own children if, like us, they had the misfortune to lose you in a distant country; if like us, they were on a foreign shore, without relatives or friends … if like us, they had no one to care for them; and especially, if, like us, they risked losing the faith for which their fathers had fought to the death.”

(Pastoral letter)

July 4: With caregivers falling ill, critics suggest it was a mistake to help the newcomers.

We very much regret that the church authorities allowed the hospital sisters to leave their convent to care for the sick. … This kindness towards the emigrants seems to us a little exaggerated. If the government wants to send us so many of these unfortunate people, who are bringing plague and famine here, it’s up to the government to care for them and support them.

(La Minerve)

Front page of The Montreal Witness, March 15, 1847.

July 5: Workers succumb to typhus as the disease spreads.

There is not a doubt now that the fever, which is the prevailing malady among these immigrants, is highly contagious. Mr. Yarwood’s (the immigration agent for Montreal) death has already been mentioned, and we are sorry to add that two or three of the doctors here are ill, including Dr. Liddell, the chief emigrant physician. Nineteen of the nuns are said to be more or less sufferers from the prevailing malady, and many of the other nurses have been laid down by fever. The disease is also spreading through the city.

(Montreal Witness)

July 12: Debate rages over where to construct the new hospital sheds. Prominent citizens call for the immigrants to be moved to the Boucherville Islands, where they will not infect local residents. But the Medical Commission, headed by Mayor John Easton Mills, nixes that idea, saying doctors and nurses could not be found to work there and that steamships would not be able to dock there.

It was, therefore, after much consideration, resolved to build the new Hospitals upon the most approved principles on the high bank of the St. Lawrence, at Point St. Charles… — John E. Mills, Chairman, Emigrant Commissioners

(Montreal Witness)

July 15: More than 1,000 citizens attend a protest meeting at Bonsecours Market on July 13 demanding the immigrants be removed to the Boucherville Islands site.

The great majority of citizens want the emigrants to be moved elsewhere to prevent the contagion that is decimating our city but the authorities are opposing them! … Ministers, priests, nuns and citizens have already paid for their devotion with their lives, many others are at death’s door, while they pretend to believe that there is no danger and refuse to remedy the situation.

July 26: As construction of the new hospital sheds nears completion, newspapers pay tribute to the caregivers who gave up their lives, dubbing them “The True Legion of Honour.”

In relation to the self-sacrificing spirit which actuated the whole Roman Catholic and Protestant Clergy of Montreal … there can be but one opinion, and that opinion pervades all classes and conditions of our population. We speak with the soberness of truth when we say that they have shown a zeal in the cause of suffering humanity rarely equalled, certainly not surpassed — worthy indeed of their august and sacred calling and honourable to the character of that religion whose doctrines they are appointed to teach.

(Montreal Pilot, reprinted in the Montreal Witness)

Aug. 13: Bishop Bourget pays tribute to fallen nuns and priests.

Since the 8th of July, the Lord has visited us to take away eight Priests, 10 Nuns and a large number of laypersons who devoted themselves, with praiseworthy zeal, to the spiritual and bodily service of the sick.

Alas! This pitiless illness has reached these heroines of Catholicism. … They have fallen, they who, like angels of peace, consoled so many tortured souls.

(Pastoral letter)

John Easton Mills was the mayor of Montreal from 1846 to 1847, when he died of typhus.

Nov. 15: Mayor Mills dies.

It is with profound grief we announce to our readers the death of John E. Mills, Esq., Mayor of this City, of typhus fever. This melancholy event which took place last Friday morning (Nov. 12) at 11 o’clock, has caused a deep feeling of sorrow throughout every class in the community.

Famine scholars are about to follow in the footsteps of the 1,490 tenants forcibly exiled to Canada from Denis Mahon’s Strokestown estate

The National Famine Walk will take place over six days from May 27th to June 1st as an international group of Famine scholars follow in the footsteps of the 1,490 tenants from Denis Mahon’s Strokestown Park House estate, who were escorted by a bailiff to Dublin to ensure they boarded ship and left Ireland in 1847.

(Shared here with kind permission of RTÉ News)

Walkers will cover 155km from Strokestown along the Royal Canal to Spencer Dock, passing the Jeannie Johnston Famine Ship and Rowan Gillespie’s Famine sculptures before arriving at the EPIC Irish emigration museum on Dublin’s Custom House Quay. President Higgins will greet them at Richmond Harbour in Clondra, Co Longford on May 27th to send them off.

The tenants’ fate after they left Dublin is a harrowing one. They travelled on open deck packet steamers to Liverpool, where they waited in the cellars of quayside buildings at Liverpool docks to board ships to Canada. The four ships they boarded – Erin’s Queen, Naomi, The Virginius and The John Munn – were badly fitted out and poorly provisioned. Almost half of those who embarked died aboard ship or in the “fever sheds” at the Grosse Île quarantine station when they arrived in Quebec. Of course, this was not known to them as they walked along the Royal Canal to Dublin, away from hunger and hoping for a better life.

The National Famine Walk begins at one of the numerous points of origin for what has been an ongoing research initiative to document the passage of more than 100,000 tenants forcibly exiled to Canada in 1847. The transatlantic voyage and passage along the Saint Lawrence river from Quebec to Toronto resulted in the second greatest loss of life in the Victorian era, second only to the Crimean War. Of those who left, more than 20,000 perished at sea or along the Saint Lawrence River, marking Canada with the infamous distinction of having the largest Irish mass graves outside of Ireland.

The 1847 evictions, transfer and passage to Canada encapsulate a twice-told tale.

First, it’s a story of British government and Irish landlord neglect. Mahon evicted 3,006 tenants and paid just under £4,000 for the passage of almost 1,000 of those he assisted to emigrate. For his unfailing cruelty, on November 2nd, 1847, Mahon was shot to death as he travelled home to Strokestown House from a Board of Guardians meeting. Murder was not a deterrent for the landlords. Evictions continued until some 11,000 persons of the 12,000 tenants were removed from Mahon’s estate.

In exporting evicted tenants, passage to Canada proved the cheaper alternative to America, given that the American authorities, anticipating the influx of a starving flotsam of Irish, amended their maritime Passenger Acts. Imposing stricter regulations, the acts barred disease-ridden ships from arriving into American ports. In 1847, the most destitute Irish emigrants were sent to the British North American colonies in New Brunswick and Canada East and West (Quebec and Ontario) on retrofitted lumber vessels as human ballast. These coffin ships averaged over 300 persons per vessel, three times that allowed under the American Passenger Acts. Mortality rates approached 40 per cent.

The story of emigration to Canada is, secondly, a contrasting one of succour and sacrifice, as a predominantly Catholic, French Canadian province of Quebec braced for and ministered to a dispossessed, disease-ravaged people in one of the greatest unrecognised human refugee crises of the 19th century.

The immigrant numbers are extraordinary. Most of them arrived at Grosse Île in Quebec, which is now a National Historic Site with a glass wall memorial for the 5,000 Irish interred in mass graves on the island. Grosse Île is twinned with the Irish National Famine Museum at Strokestown Park House, where Taoiseach Enda Kenny unveiled a similar glass wall memorial to its missing 1,490 emigrants in 2014.

Many of those 1,490 emigrants died on Grosse Île. It was there that James Quinn, a 45-year-old Irish emigrant from Lissonuffy, on the Strokestown Park estate, whispered his dying words to his two young sons, Patrick (12) and Thomas (6): “Remember your soul and your liberty”.

The orphaned Quinn brothers were adopted by a French-Canadian family who gave them a good education. They both entered the seminary and became priests with joint French and Irish congregations. In 1877, Patrick Quinn founded the still flourishing St. Patrick Society in Richmond, Quebec, where there is a theatre named after him. His younger brother, Thomas Quinn, became a champion for his French-Canadian parishioners.

At the First Congress of the French Language in Quebec City, on June 25th, 1912, Thomas Quinn thanked the French-Canadian people for their generosity. In a speech entitled “Une Voix d’Irlande” (A Voice of Ireland), he declared in French:

“It was in 1847. A famine, even worse than the one which had preceded it, threatened the Irish people with total extinction. The most astonishing part of the awful spectacle was, not to see the people die, but to see them live through such great distress. Like walking skeletons they went, in tears, seeking hospitality from more favoured lands. Stirred with compassion, French-Canadian priests, braving the epidemic, contended for the glory of rushing to their relief. I still remember one of these admirable clergymen who led us to the bedside of my dying father. As he saw us, my father with his failing voice repeated the old Irish adage, ‘Remember your soul and your liberty’.”

Like the Quinn brothers, Daniel and Catherine Tighe also sailed to Grosse Île where they were orphaned, adopted by a French-Canadian family, and allowed to keep their Irish surname. In 2000, Jim Callery, founder of the Irish National Famine Museum, visited Daniel’s son Léo Tye in rural Quebec and heard the story that inspired the search for the missing 1,490 Strokestown emigrants. He also unveiled a Celtic Cross Famine memorial in Quebec City that he had donated on behalf of the Famine Museum. In July 2013, Léo’s son Richard Tye made a return visit from Quebec to Strokestown, and was reunited with the Irish branch of the family. His Irish cousin Philip Tighe will be on the National Famine Walk.

The suffering of Famine emigrants was not confined to Grosse Île. With the arrival of 75,000 typhus-afflicted refugees, the city of Montreal, then a city of 50,000, hastily erected fever sheds to contain disease. The Annals of the Grey Nuns, a recently translated cache of diaries, details the convergence of municipal and religious groups involved in saving Irish lives, often at great personal cost. Notable casualties included the Protestant mayor of Montreal and myriad priests and nuns who worked the fever sheds of Pointe Sainte Charles.

In the wake of the emigrant passing through Montreal, over 3,000 Irish orphan children left in the care of religious orders were eventually adopted, like the Quinn and Tighe siblings, into French-Canadian families.

The journey onward into Ontario has its own history. Less a story of commonality and religious succour, the death toll is lower, given how most afflicted died at Grosse Île and Montreal. Also, a subtle sectionalism led to journalistic self-censorship in accurately chronicling the passage and burial of those who died along riverside towns throughout Ontario.

Such was the forgotten history of Canadian involvement with the fated year of 1847, simply because the crisis and sacrifice had happened so far away, within a single season. For the most part, accounts of the worst suffering were recorded in French, so the episode closed in the forgotten reaches of Quebec. That is, until recently.

In 2016, Irish author and ultra-runner Michael Collins ran a marathon-a-day for a month from Grosse Île to Toronto; he was inspired by his reading of the Grey Nuns’ annals. En route, along the Saint Lawrence, he met historical societies researching their town’s archives and recorded anecdotal stories passed down by descendants, which he documented on his Irish Diaspora Run 2016 Facebook page. More than 100,000 people visited the page during the run, and he has reactivated it for the National Famine Walk.

The project continues. At Grosse Île quarantine station, a memorial serves as a cautionary reminder of what can befall a dispossessed people, and at the terminus of the route in Toronto, Ireland Park has become a place of pilgrimage, memorialising the passage of 1847. Situated along Toronto’s docklands, a series of Rowan Gillespie Famine sculptures reach back across the ocean to Gillespie’s Famine sculptures on Dublin’s Custom House Quay Docklands. Without descriptive plaques detailing the history of 1847, the sculptures simultaneously encompass and transcend Irish history, evoking the universality of the immigrant experience, both past and present. In the furtherance of peace, Ireland Park Foundation has reconfigured a national tragedy, not as a source of differentiation, but of shared experience. In 2017, the foundation will unveil Dr George Robert Grasett Park, celebrating the efforts of the Canadian medical profession which so tirelessly worked to save both those who arrived and Toronto’s own citizens from disease.

What remains yet to be memorialised is Montreal’s response to 1847. Specifically, The Black Rock memorial, a stone hastily erected by workmen who uncovered over 6,000 bodies during the 1859 construction of the Victoria Bridge, lies in the median of a major arterial in downtown Montreal and is in jeopardy of being summarily removed as the city plans a major overhaul of the area. The Montreal Irish Monument Park Foundation is locked in a tenuous battle with city, provincial and federal authorities to preserve and allocate what is currently an abandoned parking lot as the future site of a memorial grounds honoring both the 1847 emigrants and those who came to their aid.

The National Famine Walk complements these projects to ensure that Famine emigrants like Strokestown’s missing 1,490 are commemorated on both sides of the Atlantic. In following in their footsteps, the walkers are not only honouring their legacy. They are embarking on a journey to trace the descendants of the 1,490 emigrants in Canada and the United States, especially from Irish Famine orphans adopted in Quebec. They are also laying the foundation for a permanent walking trail along the Royal Canal between Strokestown and Dublin, the National Famine Way. With its advent, hitherto inaccessible paths are providing opportunities to walk in the footsteps of the dispossessed.

Prof. Christine Kinealy (and founding director of the Ireland’s Great Hunger Institute at Quinnipiac University) talks to ADAPT about the cultural impact of the great famine and how it influenced Ireland in years to come.

Author Cathal Poirteir tells about the particular character from the 1,490 who left Strokestown, one John O’Connor. His story is a tragic one as he died during the famine, but not from hunger!

Famine Way Walkers Re-enact the arrival of the 1,490 at Spencer Dock, Dublin.

Having waked from Strokestown, Co Roscommon, Famine Way Walkers 2018 re-enact the final steps journey of 1490 migrant tenants from Strokestown as they made their way towards the replica famine ship, the Jeanie Johnston. This is a playlist of three short but separate videos.

The National Famine Way is being developed by Strokestown Park House, the Irish National Famine Museum, and the Irish Heritage Trust in partnership with Waterways Ireland, the ADAPT Centre for Digital Content Technology, Ireland’s Great Hunger Institute at Quinnipiac University, Ireland Park Foundation, the University of Toronto, Royal Canal Amenity Group, Roscommon and Longford County Councils, and Strokestown Community Town Team.

Historian Jason King finds Michael Collins has spawned new forms of creative energy in finding his own way back to the story of the Famine

In Michael Collins’s novel The Death of All Things Seen, native Canadian woman Ursula reflects on the forgotten “great lessons” of animal and human migrations. She “talked of First Nations people who bore witness along the Saint Lawrence, in the aftermath of the demise of the salmon, to the arrival of a great spawn of a new human misery, the portal, wide-eyed coffin ships, unloading a grim discharge of Europe’s flotsam. The Irish, most notably, those awful, pale-faced, skeletal wretches, ragged in the embattled way salmon rushed headlong against the current in a death run for the spawning grounds to seed the next generation”.

It is a strikingly original metaphor for the Irish Famine migration of 1847. But the metaphor of spawning also marks Collins’s creative process, his return to the original source and difficult subject matter from which his literary career began.

In an earlier Irish Times article entitled “Remembering 20,000 Famine refugees who died in 1847,” (November 26th, 2016) Collins recalled the creative block he suffered when he began to write a Famine novel and establish his reputation. In his own words: “I would spend a year researching the historical record and in the end wither from the burden of inhabiting the psyche of either the Irish peasantry or the landed aristocracy”.

After that year, the novel remained unwritten. “It lives as a singular literary failure that has dogged me,” Collins adds, “given I would eventually transfer a sociological acuity to all things American, specifically the collapse of American industrialism, as captured in my Booker shortlisted novel, The Keepers of Truth. The question plagued me – how could I stand as outsider, impartial witness, and documentarian to another history whilst my own eluded me?”

Book Club podcast

The sublimation of Collins’s Famine novel into his rendering of the rust belt in The Keepers of Truth was the making of his literary career

The sublimation of Collins’s Famine novel into his rendering of the rust belt in The Keepers of Truth was the making of his literary career, one that now spans 10 works of fiction. His penetrating insight into the lives of the struggling white working-class Americans who people his novels set in the de-industrialised mid-western United States seems prescient now that they have played such a crucial role in delivering the Trump presidency. No doubt the Clinton political machine would have been better served by eschewing data driven micro-messaging in favour of lively discussions and character analysis of Collins’s works. As the documentarian of another history, his Booker nomination was no small compensation for his unfinished juvenilia.

Michael Collins has spawned new forms of creative energy in finding his own way back to the genre. One of his outlets is the extreme travel writing he pioneered fusing the roles of author and athlete

Yet something was lost in Collins’s failure to complete his Famine novel. It is a genre that has come into its own with Sebastian Barry’s Costa Prize winning gay romance Days Without End (2016), Emma Donoghue’s acclaimed The Wonder (2016) and Joseph O’Connor’s intricately-plotted, faux-Victorian murder mystery and bestseller Star of the Sea (2003).

Michael Collins has spawned new forms of creative energy in finding his own way back to the genre. One of his outlets is the extreme travel writing he pioneered fusing the roles of author and athlete when Collins ran over 900 kilometres last summer in the footsteps of the Famine Irish from the Grosse Ile quarantine station in Quebec to Ireland Park in Toronto. Not only did he run a marathon a day every day for a month, but he also filed crisp and incisive stories about his discoveries and the people and places he encountered along the route that could only be the envy of more sedentary, desk bound writers.

Dr Jason King presents a copy of Michael Collins’ The Death of All Things Seen to Kevin Michael Vickers, Canada’s Ambassador to Ireland

Before embarking on the run, Collins had paid a visit to the Saving the Famine Irish: The Grey Nuns and the Great Hunger exhibition at Quinnipiac University which was launched by President Higgins when it transferred to the Glasnevin Museum in September 2016. He also read the eyewitness testimonies of the Grey Nuns who cared for Famine Irish emigrants in the fever sheds of Montreal in the digital Irish Famine Archive that I curate. “The most striking fact that emerged in reading the transcribed documents from the time was,” for Collins, “how the municipal authorities, in tandem with the religious orders of Montreal, had marshalled their collective resources to care and minister to the sick and dying Irish,” especially the hundreds of orphans who were adopted by French-Canadian and Irish families.

Yet he was also struck by the sheer incongruity between the Grey Nuns’ stories of compassion, devotion, and self-sacrifice and the stark Black Rock memorial that marks the site where 6,000 Irish fever victims lie buried. It is not only the largest Famine Irish mass grave in North America, but also the most dangerous visit. Indeed, it is situated on a traffic meridian on the busy highway approaching the city’s Victoria Bridge, built by Irish labourers in 1859, while the remains of the Famine dead lie under the asphalt of an adjacent, overflow parking lot that is owned but rarely used by Lotto Quebec. “Why are 6,000 Irish buried under a Montreal traffic island?” Collins asked in one of his Irish Times articles during the run (June 23rd, 2016). It is a question that far too few Quebecers ask themselves.

From May 27th to June 1st, 2017, Michael Collins will join a group of walkers to follow in the footsteps of these 1,490 Famine emigrants from Stroketown to Dublin along the Royal Canal

The Black Rock is also the grave site for some of the 1,490 tenants who were forced to emigrate in 1847 on some of the worst of the coffin ships, such as the Virginius and the Naomi, from the Strokestown Park House Roscommon estate of Major Denis Mahon (who was assassinated in November 1847), now the home of the Irish National Famine Museum.

From May 27th to June 1st, 2017, Michael Collins will be joining a group of Famine walkers to follow in the footsteps of these 1,490 Famine emigrants from Stroketown to Dublin along the Royal Canal. The Famine walk is being organised by the Irish Heritage Trust and Famine Museum in partnership with Waterways Ireland to help establish a new Famine trail. The journey will provide Collins with a new narrative arc to follow the one he created during his Irish Diaspora Run 2016. It is also the narrative arc of a writer returning to his unfinished Famine novel.

Author Michael Collins explains why as an emigrant, a father and a writer he feels drawn to explore his own sense of Irishness

My relationship with The Irish Times started last year when I approached its books editor Martin Doyle about running a marathon a day from Grosse Île to Toronto. He graciously agreed and found funding for me through the Department of Foreign Affairs’ Global Irish Media Fund.

In the year of preparation, both in the (over 6,000) miles run and relying on the support from Famine scholars Dr Christine Kinealy and Dr Jason King, I owe a debt of gratitude. I would also like to acknowledge the help and support of the Montreal Irish Monument Park Foundation and Ireland Park Foundation, Toronto. Though separate entities, they are bookends to a Canadian passage along the Saint Lawrence and their organisational resources have allowed scholars to further research the passage from Quebec into Ontario, two disparate and unique histories that are now being explored in earnest.

Many of the towns that I passed on my run had erected Celtic crosses in remembrance of those Irish who died along the route of the Saint Lawrence. Much of the historical record, including the location of the mass burial of the typhus victims, was lost until Dr King began his research. Efforts are underway to create a virtual historical tour of the journey.

Perhaps it is an immigrant lament, but in the accumulation of years since I left Ireland, and with the advancing years of my children, I feel an obligation to better understand what it is to be Irish

With the completion and release of my 10th book, I have sought to reorient myself toward my own sense of Irishness. Perhaps it is an immigrant lament, but in the accumulation of years since I left Ireland, and with the advancing years of my four children, I feel an obligation to re-engage and better understand what it is to be Irish. We are remembered in the historical record as victims, as a people of a terrible genocide or famine. Indeed, even giving our suffering a name had been a cause of contention.

In a continued effort to help tell our story, I’ve a Facebook page that serves as a digital repository of historical documents that I uploaded during my run last year, along with daily videos I recorded. It continues to be updated. More than 100,000 people visited the page during June/July last year. It can be accessed at facebook.com/irishdiasporarun2016

For many, the rediscovery of a historical event some 150 years past has opened deep psychological scars. Of the 100,000 visitors to our page, many are now availing of online genealogical resources, and adding to the collective story of the passage and eventual settlement of those immigrants who crossed in 1847. The fated story of families separated through quarantine is a recurring motif. For a decade after the passage of 1847, notices appeared throughout Ontario with relatives inquiring after their loved ones. We are actively collecting and collating these accounts.

Indeed, for many of the diaspora Irish I met along the run, the ancestral passage to Canada and America, especially during the hunger years, is still perceived as a form of exile connected to draconian British rule. In total, the Great Hunger accounted for the emigration of more than a million and the death of another million. Even contemporary descendants far removed from the tragic departure of the Hunger years, when asked to reflect on their ancestors’ arrival to Canada, were more apt to characterise it as an exile than an opportunity.

The journey continues. I am participating in a sponsored walk from May 27th to June 1st, 2017, organised by The Irish National Famine Museum. Starting from Strokestown Park House along the Royal Canal and continuing to Dublin, the walk retraces the route of the 1,490 tenants who were forced to emigrate to Quebec in 1847. The museum is also launching a campaign to try to find as many living descendants of the original 1,490 Strokestown emigrants as possible. Ireland’s President Michael D Higgins will greet the walkers along the route.

Again, I am indebted to so many for a year of writing and running, and for being granted the opportunity to reconnect with those at home and afar.

On May 17, 1847, the Irish ship Carricks was wrecked at Cap-des-Rosiers, a few hundred meters off beach in Quebec’s Gaspé Peninsula, carrying 187 Irish passengers and a Stradivarius violin.

Charles Kavanagh’s quest is also that of many other descendants of Irish Famine immigrants to learn more about their origins. He seeks to trace the story of the sinking of the Carricks Famine ship from which his ancestors Patrick and Sarah Kaveney survived in May 1847, and unveils the history not only of his family, but also the legacy of the Irish in Quebec.

The film is directed by Viveka Melki and narrated by Charles Kavanagh, in collaboration with the archaeologist Martin Perron and the historians Simon Jolivet and Jo-Anick Proulx.

Cap de Rosier has a tragic interest on account of the tales of marine disaster with which it is associated. The story is still told in Gaspe village of the good ship “Carricks” which sailed from Sligo, Ireland, in May, 1847.

And old lady, perhaps the sole survivor, remembered the occurrence when interviewed by the writer. She, a child of twelve years, was one of seven children, and like all the passengers, her family were emigrants. After a rough and uncomfortable passage of twenty-three days, the captain missed his reckoning in a blinding snow-storm, and in the darkness of the night, struck the cruel cape. One stroke of the angry wave swept her clean. Comparatively few were saved, after hours of cold, hunger and fear such as may be imagined. The inhabitants came to the rescue, and treated the pitiable survivors with kindness. Truly the beach presented a gruesome spectacle the following day, strewn for a mile and a half with dead bodies. For a whole day two ox-carts carried the dead to deep trenches near the scene of the disaster. In the autumn the heavy storms sweep within sound of the spot. Thus peacefully, with the requiem of the waves and winds they rest. In recent years a monument has been erected to their memory by the parishioners of St. Patrick’s Montreal. Alas! this is only one of the many sorrowful tales which are related of Cap de Rosier.

Petition for Reimbursement for Expenses in Caring for Carricks’ Survivors:

Canadian descendants of a family who fled Sligo during the Famine returned last weekend to retrace their last journey on Irish soil.

Rose Marie and Terry Stanley walked the Famine Trail from the Caves of Keash to Sligo Quay on Saturday to mark the 170th anniversary since their forefathers, Patrick and Sarah Kaveney and their six children left Cross on the 5th of April 1847.

They were joined by eight Canadian family members, their Ward cousins from Keash and the Keaveneys from Dublin. On their arrival at the Quay the group were honoured at a civic reception at City Hall hosted by Mayor of Sligo Municipal District Cllr Marie Casserly.

Rose Marie expressed her appreciation to the Mayor and spoke of the impact of the walk together with the unexpected gift of finding the family’s Sligo roots and connecting with cousins here in Ireland. She committed to returning in 2021 to walk the Famine Trail again.

While here Rose Marie will present a play called ‘EMIGRANT’ based of the epic journey of her ancestors, Patrick Kaveney and Sarah McDonagh. It will be presented in Cliffoney Hall on Thursday, 20th April at 8.30 pm, and in White Hall Keash on Saturday 22nd April again at 8.30pm. In Cliffoney Anne Hoey and Frank Kielty will assist the presentation.

Patrick and Sarah,their six children and 172 other emigrants from Lord Palmerston’s estates sailed on board the Carricks of Whitehaven to Quebec.

The ship ran into a late winter storm and was shipwrecked on 28th April 1847, in the Gulf of St Lawrence, just off the coast of Cap des Rosiers, Canada. Only 48 survived, including Patrick and Sarah together with their son Martin, but their five daughters perished.

EPIC will be hosting a temporary exhibition charting the experiences Irish Famine refugees in Canada. “Saving the Famine Irish: The Grey Nuns and the Great Hunger” tells the story of the religious orders in Montreal whose members gave selflessly to Irish immigrants during the summer of 1847 – their time of greatest need. The exhibition runs in Unit 5-6 of CHQ from 30/03/2017 until 22/04/2017.

Many thousands of people fled from Ireland during the Great Hunger and immigrated to Canada. Famine immigrants to Montreal were not only among the poorest of the poor, but many of them arrived already sick with typhus fever. Despite this, a number of people in the English and French Canadian communities provided the ailing and the dying with shelter and support. In the forefront of this compassionate movement were the Sisters of Charity, also known as the Grey Nuns. The exhibition is co-presented by EPIC The Irish Emigration Museum and Ireland’s Great Hunger Institute at Quinnipiac University. It is currently on display to mark the 170th anniversary of ‘Black 47’, the high point of the Great Irish Famine.

Michael Collins has been named as the Irish Times Book Club Author in March 2017. His novel The Keepers of the Truth was shortlisted for the 2000 Man Booker Prize and the Impac Award and won Irish Novel of the Year. He is the author of 10 works of fiction including most recently The Death of All Things Seen (2016).

In the summer of 2016 Michael Collins also completed his epic 550-mile run from Grosse Ile quarantine station in Quebec to Ireland Park Famine Memorial in Toronto to raise funds to commemorate the route Famine refugees took across Canada and the locals who helped them.

Dr Jason King presents a copy of Michael Collins’s novel The Death of All Things Seen to Canadian Ambassador to Ireland Kevin Vickers.

After the completion of Michael Collins’s Irish Diaspora Run and the publication of The Death of All Things Seen in July 2016, Canadian Ambassador to Ireland Kevin Vickers made the following statement:

I would like to congratulate the Booker-nominated novelist and ultra-runner Michael Collins on the completion of his Irish Diaspora Run 2016. This past June and July he ran a marathon a day from Grosse Ilê in Quebec to Ireland Park in Toronto following in the footsteps of tens of thousands of Irish emigrants who fled the Great Famine for Canada in 1847. Next year he will continue this run along Ireland’s Wild Atlantic Way west coast trail.

I would also like to thank Michael Collins for giving me a signed copy of his new novel, The Death of All Things Seen, which has already been acclaimed as a “driven, virtuoso” work and “a formidable, demanding achievement”. In both his novel and during the Irish Diaspora Run, Collins has sought to discover and retell some of the most powerful stories of the Famine Irish in Canada. He was particularly inspired by the “Saving the Famine Irish: The Grey Nuns and the Great Hunger” exhibit and Digital Irish Famine Archive (http://faminearchive.nuigalway.ie/) which he describes as “nothing short of genius”.

It gives me great pleasure to announce that the “Saving the Famine Irish: The Grey Nuns and the Great Hunger” exhibit, curated by Dr. Jason King and Professor Christine Kinealy of Ireland’s Great Hunger Institute at Quinnipiac University, is coming to Dublin for the Irish National Famine Commemoration in September, and then will travel around the country. Next year marks the 170th anniversary of the Irish Famine migration and the 150th anniversary of the founding of Canada. It is only fitting that we pay tribute to these Canadian caregivers of the Famine Irish who express our values and the enduring ties between our two countries.

In a recent Irish Times article(November 26, 2016) entitled “Remembering 20,000 Famine refugees who died in 1847,” Michael Collins recalled his epic Irish Diaspora Run and how was inspired by his visit to the “Saving the Famine Irish” exhibit:

Michael Collins at the beginning of Irish Diaspora Run at Grosse Ile National Historic Site.

Michael Collins on Irish Diaspora Run in Quebec.

Michael Collins:

Within the Famine memorial fundraising community, there’s a phenomenon quietly referred to as “famine fatigue”, which tacitly acknowledges that, in the receding century and a half since the events of those terrible famine years, there’s a limit to the emotional empathy that can be wrought from a people, no matter the numbers – one million starved and another two million were forced to emigrate.

Time moves on and yet, when I first heard the term, it rattled me that my month-long Irish Diaspora Run – a marathon-a-day for 30 days, motivated to bring awareness and raise funds to memorialise 20,000 Irish who died during the 1847 passage of 100,000 famine-stricken emigrants to Canada – might be viewed as just another far-cast mournful act of an emigrant dwelling on ancient history.

Michael Collins on Irish Diaspora Run in Quebec.

Michael Collins on Irish Diaspora Run in Ontario.

The term “famine fatigue” was the first reality check I would experience in what has become an evolving and contentious coming to terms with the actual cause, circumstance and culpability regarding the Famine years of 1845-49.

My first point of contact was with the highly regarded Irish Famine historian Dr Christine Kinealy, at Quinnipiac University in Connecticut who has gathered a stirring collection of Famine-inspired sculptures housed in the university’s library.

Minister Heather Humphreys, President Michael D. Higgins, Professor Christine Kinealy, and Dr. Jason King at launch of “Saving the Famine Irish: The Grey Nuns and the Great Hunger” exhibit, Glasnevin Museum, September 11, 2016.

Typhus-stricken

She was then curating a Famine-related exhibit on the Montreal order of Grey Nuns, who had not only ministered to the typhus-stricken Irish in 1847, but also undertook the care and eventual adoption of over 6,000 Irish orphans into a French-speaking Quebecois community…

In my own youth, the Famine was not discussed, partly out of a reflexive sense of shame that we had been so subjugated under British rule, but also in our pragmatic rush throughout the early 1980s toward a new Ireland of so-called young Europeans.

In the instinct to outrun history, there was an underlying economic indeterminacy tied to the protracted Troubles and with it, a spike in emigration.

So, too, a nationalist movement, in calculatedly drawing upon the famine, had stoked an impassioned Irish-American community further complicated our self-determinism. We were at once a people united and divided by our own history – by those who remained and the descendants of those who had left.

Upon emigrating to America, I wrote my first collection of short stories, The Meat Eaters, an ode to country inspired by loss and displacement.

Soon after, swayed by legions of emigrant descendants who configured their history around the historical displacement of the Famine, I began a Famine novel.

I would spend a year researching the historical record and in the end wither from the burden of inhabiting the psyche of either the Irish peasantry or the landed aristocracy.

It lives as a singular literary failure that has dogged me, given I would eventually transfer a sociological acuity to all things American, specifically the collapse of American industrialism, as captured in my Booker shortlisted novel, The Keepers of Truth.

The question plagued me – how could I stand as outsider, impartial witness, and documentarian to another history whilst my own eluded me?

Deconstruction of the American Dream

In the intervening years, as an ultrarunner, I would captain the Irish 100K Senior Team. In so doing, I vicariously drew upon the Famine, inhabiting the underlying perseverance of a repressed and starved people in the sublimation of distances covered.

Michael Collins on Irish Diaspora Run in Quebec.

Michael Collins on Irish Diaspora Run in Ontario.

In so admitting it, in drawing on this historical past, I feel, even now, a reflexive cringe at this ignoble servicing of so many dead for the concentrated efforts of trying to win a race.

Years would pass. My writing life turned solely to the deconstruction of the American Dream. Even the tenuous connection to a Famine-inspired endurance receded as I retired from competitive ultra-running.

In the interval of years, there was, too, the signing of the Good Friday Agreement, and of course 9/11, and, with it, the end of funds funnelled home given how terrorism was forever re-defined and prosecuted under The Patriot Act.

By the latter part of the first decade of the 21st century, I was furthest from my Irishness and deep into a new novel examining the effects of the financial collapse of 2008 on an American family.

Likewise, a post-financial crash Ireland, caught in the entanglement of what it meant to be European and in the midst of its austerity measures, was turned from nationalist preoccupations that had figured so centrally just decades earlier.

It was not until the fall of 2015, while taking a month-long French language course in Quebec City, that I came across the fated 1847 ocean passage to Canada of 100,000 famine-stricken Irish who had been evicted from some of the most remote estates in a great evacuation of the last enclaves of Gaelic culture.

Much of what I read was in French, or parlayed through a halting bilingual exchange with local historians. It was a story twice told: first a story of the Irish, but also a story of the French-speaking Québécois who became unwitting participants in the greatest loss of life in the Victorian period, surpassed only by the Great Famine itself and the Crimean War.

Michael Collins on Irish Diaspora Run in Quebec.

In the narrative arc of that singular season of death, there was the providential coincidence that those who had survived the ocean crossing eventually continued along the Saint Lawrence river for some 600 miles, to Toronto – a tally of miles I registered as a distance I could run in a single month, amounting to a marathon a day.

I made a promise to return to Canada to complete a solitary pilgrimage along a forgotten route…

Michael Collins on Irish Diaspora Run in Ontario.

Irish mass graves

The fault lines of the complex academic, political and sectarian divide, which appear everywhere in the historical record of the famine, did not surface as I arrived at Grosse Île quarantine island along the Saint Lawrence river.

In the great oddment of the contained history of 1847, in approaching the island, nothing suggests the province holds the ignominious distinction of containing the largest number of Irish mass graves in the world.

Grosse Île is a site of Irish pilgrimage – though, to Canadians, it is a heritage site dedicated to preserving the island’s historical significance as a quarantine processing facility from 1832 to 1932.

Michael Collins at Grosse Ile National Historic Site

The Irish Famine is but one story within Grosse Île’s long history, and yet the facts are stark. From June to November of 1847, of the 100,000 who emigrated, 7,000 died during the 40 to 50-day Atlantic crossing while, on Grosse Île, a further 5,000 succumbed to typhus and were buried in trenched graves.

As early as May 1847, Dr Douglas, chief medical officer at Grosse Île, wrote letters imploring assistance to offset impending disaster. The British government wilfully disregarded such requests. The coffin ships kept sailing.

By mid-June, due to the throng of the infirm in the fever sheds and a lack of medical staff, passengers languished for upwards of two weeks aboard an armada of 40 ships backed up two miles along the Saint Lawrence.

Without adequate water and food, infection spread.

The diarist and coffin ship passenger Robert Whyte recorded seeing “hundreds . . . literally flung on the beach, left amid the mud and stones to crawl on the dry land as they could”.

Of the 427 passengers who arrived aboard The Agnes, only 150 survived Grosse Île.

In my journey to the island, amidst a riot of children on a school excursion, there would be little regard for solemnity. On the cusp of beginning my month-long run, I felt the reflexive need to rationalise why I was compelled to make this pilgrimage in the name of so many nameless dead. There was no immediate answer.

In a quiet disengagement from the school children, I walked first to a Celtic cross that had been erected atop the island in 1909, some 60 years after the fateful events of 1847, then eventually wound my way to a commemorative glass memorial inaugurated in 1998.

Grosse Île glass memorial

Fronting a series of unmarked trenched graves amounting to 5,000 souls, an etched glass sail bears a roll call of the dead. In finding the name Collins, the historical context of why this happened and who was to blame was suddenly less important than simply bearing witness to the place where so many had died.

Trauma

Early on, I’d understood that this run would be the salvage of a near lost history in the far-flung, French-speaking province of Quebec. What passed represented a single season of death.

Of those 6,000 emigrant orphans sent into the countryside, there has never been a great appeal among them to reconnect with their Irish roots. Perhaps the trauma was too great, or the succour of those who came to their aid did not bear compromise. There was the language barrier, too, and a spirited Francophile resistance to English rule.

The most striking fact that emerged in reading the transcribed documents from the time was how the municipal authorities, in tandem with the religious orders of Montreal, had marshalled their collective resources to care and minister to the sick and dying Irish.

Simply put, the question early on was: What affinity did the native Québécois have toward this advance of typhus-stricken Irish?

In a slow advance toward Montreal, much asked in that question became apparent.

Michael Collins on Irish Diaspora Run in Quebec.

I chose Route 132, given its languid course along the Saint Lawrence. In running this less-travelled road, I came upon religious shrines that harkened to a penitent spectre of a more ancient, religious life, shrines eerily reminiscent of those that still exist along the coastal crag of the West of Ireland; weathered figures of Christ’s passion on a cross facing the eternal scour of the Atlantic gales.

This is expected of Ireland, but to come upon these roadside shrines in the rainy cold of Canada was a revelation.

1847 figured as a proxy war between Catholics and proselytizing ministers for the salvation of souls.

Through the recent work of historian Jason King, the historical record of the Grey Nuns has been recovered and translated. The diary entries capture the miasma of catastrophic sickness.

Michael Collins and Jason King in Dublin.

Apocalyptic

In a Dante-esque apocalyptic vision, 75,000 emigrants descended on Montreal, which then had a population of 50,000. There are descriptions of sickness and effluence in the fever sheds that sickened veteran doctors, and yet the so-called Martyrs of Charity actively sought out the most distressing cases of disease.

What is transmitted is a faith eclipsed by an Enlightenment age of reason and science and, eventually, a jaded modernist cynicism.

In the breadth of some 600 miles, my run would eventually follow the ragged migration of survivors through a divided country: first the Francophile province of Quebec, then the Neo-English province of Ontario.

Their journey reveals a history of how the disparate Canadian populations dealt with the refugee crisis, and yet my initial sweep into the remote, uninhabited lands of Quebec proved the most physically and spiritually challenging. Here lay a lost history and the greatest loss of life.

Collective amnesia

Early in planning the run, there was a singular destination I’d settled on that I felt defined our unsatisfactory collective response to the tragic events of 1847 – Montreal’s Black Rock.

Michael Collins at Montreal Black Rock Famine memorial.

Set in a road median in downtown Montreal, the rock commemorates 6,000 Irish interred in a mass grave. The burial site had been all but forgotten until it was uncovered during construction in 1859 of the Victoria Bridge. Such was the collective amnesia of a traumatized city. The workers who unearthed the entombed erected, at their own expense, the stone that now commemorates those almost forgotten dead.

In so reading about the Black Rock, I discovered that, at some point, it will most probably be removed given the sprawl of the city. I contacted the Montreal Irish Monument Park Foundation, a non-profit preemptively seeking to avert the eventual unceremonious mass exhumation of corpses with a proposed famine memorial park across from a derelict parking lot in an industrial wasteland under federal management.

The director, Fergus Keyes, was frank in his general assessment of the dim prospects of negotiating the provincial and federal bureaucratic red tape to acquire the land.

Fergus Keyes welcomes Michael Collins to Black Rock.

Michael Collins and Fergus Keyes at Black Rock.

Yet, his organization has persisted with an annual commemorative gathering that includes the absurd spectacle of having to dart across a major thoroughfare to an island median memorial to honour 6,000 famine victims.

Donovan King and Michael Collins at Black Rock.

In viewing an online video, in witnessing the ragged assembly of the faithful, I took it as a smouldering indictment of our slowness in demanding recognition of the undisputable horrors which befell our ancestors.

Media scrum greets Michael Collins at Black Rock.

On a Facebook page Irish Diaspora Run 2016, set up to provide historical information regarding the famine and to chart my progress, a sub-group quickly spawned around the Irish housing crash. Members likened the modern spate of foreclosure evictions to what happened during the famine.

There was the sense that the famine was relevant and yet distantly remote from the pressures facing people in the collapse of the housing market.

I sympathised with the understated indictment in dwelling on a remote past, and yet there are times when it takes the voice of the pining diaspora to reckon with history.

If we are to be charged with an arrested sense of history, then so be it.

I was cognizant that Canada was the end for so many Irish, but also the beginning of the Canadian Irish diaspora experience.

Psychological reckoning

In the first week I ran over 300km and arrived, shivering, into the Montreal suburbs late at night. Faltering during the afternoon run, I had all but collapsed. This was the beginning of the summer scorch and drenching humidity. In ultra-running, the body succumbs and recovers in a realignment of metabolic adjustment.

It was partly that, but perhaps more so a psychological reckoning in anticipating my arrival at the Black Rock the following day.

My hotel room that night was 90 miles behind. Eschewing backtracking, myself, my daughter and driver waited out the coming dawn sequestered in an industrial parking lot, the grotto of the car light intermittently lit in our exit and return. This was our small vigil in the greater throng of Montreal. We were penitents and refugees for a night.

The next day, I resumed the run toward the Black Rock with a keener sense of purpose. On hand were local and national media. Also present was Canadian parliamentarian Marc Miller who added his support to creating a famine memorial park.

Michael Collins and Marc Miller MP at Black Rock.

I heard, too, that President Michael D Higgins had agreed to open the Saving the Famine Irish: The Grey Nuns and the Great Hunger exhibit at Glasnevin Cemetery, thus bringing to light the untold story of Montreal’s valorous efforts that averted even greater loss of life in that fateful year of 1847.

The Montreal memorial park is too long in the waiting. This is not solely a French-Canadian burden, nor should it be. Our descendants died under the most appalling circumstances. There are the cynics who will say, “Let the dead lie where they will.”

Such sentiments encapsulate the spectre of “famine fatigue”. It is, of course, the easier choice. Yet, at the Black Rock, and then onward into Cornwall, Ontario, where I met a lone school teacher, who erected a Celtic cross in the honour of over 52 famine victims, to my talk on the Syrian refugee crisis at Skeleton Park’s famine cemetery in Kingston, Ontario, I came across a cadre of historically minded citizens who believe remembrance is not connected with advancing animosities, but simply preserving the historical reality of a year so many would prefer to forget.